Thursday, December 1st 2022
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with Nearly Half its Power-limit and Undervolting Loses Just 8% Performance
The monstrous NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" graphics card has the potential to be a very efficient high-end graphics card with a daily-use undervolt, and with its power-limit halved, finds an undervolting adventure review by Korean tech publication Quasar Zone. The reviewer tested the RTX 4090 with a number of GPU core voltage settings, and lowered software-level power-limits (down from its 450 W default).
It's important to note that 450 W is a very arbitrary number for the RTX 4090's power limit, the GPU rarely draws that much power in typical gaming workloads. Our own testing at stock settings sees its gaming power draw around the 340 W-mark. Quasar Zone tested the RTX 4090 with a power limit as low as 60% (270 W). With its most aggressive power management they could muster (i.e. 270 W PL), the card was found to lose just around 8% of performance at 4K UHD, averaged across five AAA games at maxed out settings. The story is similar with undervolting the GPU down to 850 mV, down from its 1 V stock. In both cases, the performance loss appear well contained, while providing a reduction in power-draw (in turn heat and noise).
Sources:
VideoCardz, Quasar Zone
It's important to note that 450 W is a very arbitrary number for the RTX 4090's power limit, the GPU rarely draws that much power in typical gaming workloads. Our own testing at stock settings sees its gaming power draw around the 340 W-mark. Quasar Zone tested the RTX 4090 with a power limit as low as 60% (270 W). With its most aggressive power management they could muster (i.e. 270 W PL), the card was found to lose just around 8% of performance at 4K UHD, averaged across five AAA games at maxed out settings. The story is similar with undervolting the GPU down to 850 mV, down from its 1 V stock. In both cases, the performance loss appear well contained, while providing a reduction in power-draw (in turn heat and noise).
64 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with Nearly Half its Power-limit and Undervolting Loses Just 8% Performance
Instead you received a stupid RTX 4090 with insane overclock and stupid cooling, and not custom cards with water cooling as higher tier cards which offer up to 15% higher performance.
Smart engineering would be a 300 W reference RTX 4090 and 450 W super overclocked and water cooled RTX 4090 Ti.
Been doing undervolting/PL limit for years now. Wouldn't run them any other way.
If I did purchase a 4080/90 this would be a no briner for me.
The RTX 4080 is sort of the same story, but slightly less dramatic of a drop. With it, you get your 90% performance at around 270W power.
In terms of PPW, the RTX 4090 is unsurprisingly much better here. Its easier to run more processing hardware at a lower power demand and get higher parallel compute performance. Its what we see on regular CPUs too.
For those who aren't fully updated - yes, you can edit values on Ada GPU BIOSes now
www.techpowerup.com/download/nvidia-nvflash/
The topic of this article should be no surprise to literally anyone based on Turing and Ampere GPUs. Both those generations could undervolt like crazy with damn near no performance loss. Why would it be any different for RTX4000?
Are you sure your cousin is work on NVIDIA as GPU architect?
Before They decided the ideal power for 4090, they already tested and made more than 1000x attempted with some un-ideal conditions to make sure this GPU run as stable as it can with its all features activated (full Ray Tracing function, heaviest rendering workload, etc.)
And if your cousin truly working on nVIDIA GPU R&D dept. ; then actually he know that this "450 watt" actually was already the "win win solution wattage" value (rather than 600watt peak) to make everybody happy ;)
Do not always trusted some kids or media with their controversial news to get more attention. They test it with what condition? as Cyberpunk with RTX ON already hit more than 450watt for make sure its running stable on that workload. And many render condition that actually need more wattage than that.
You can tell this to your "virtual cousin" ;)
so he can tell that "every team member are moron and stupid" in the morning meeting. LMAO!
No game has ever gone over 400w,that is entire system load.
RTX 4090 power consumption has been blown out of proportion by team red and random weirdos. This card uses less power than my 3090!
I will say DLSS is still a hot mess.